The self you have betrayed is your mind; self-esteem is reliance on one’s power to think. The ego you seek, that essential “you” which you cannot express or define, is not your emotions or inarticulate dreams, but your intellect, that judge of your supreme tribunal whom you’ve impeached in order to drift at the mercy of any stray shyster you describe as your “feeling.”

Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not.

All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man's mind and labor.

Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us.

Whatever he was-that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love-he was not man.

Discard the protective rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility. Learn to value yourself, which means: to FIGHT for your happiness, and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.